Leeds Digital Week and The Economist gig

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Quick post to say that I’m speaking at Leeds Digital Week this morning on the Power of Online PR.

Then it’s the train to London where I’m a guest at The Economist Innovation Awards (tonight at The Science Museum) and Summit (tomorrow).

Twitter cartoon: know when and when not to use social media

Thanks to Media Culpa, who got it from Rob Cottingham.

Amy Joins Wolfstar

Hi, I’m Amy and I’ve just joined the Wolfstar team as account manager. I’m originally from a small town just over the Pennines called Darwen, but have lived in Leeds for the past seven years. Technically, I’m now from Bradford, as I recently took the plunge and bought my first house there.

I love having my own place – and am proud to say I now know how to do lots of important DIY things like laying skirting board and putting up coving – however this is also where almost all of my money goes!

I studied Public Relations at Leeds Metropolitan University, during which I worked for Citypress PR in Manchester for just over a year. This is where I got my first taste of PR practice. After uni I worked for Waterside PR in Leeds, along with fellow Wolfstar employee Sam. Most recently I was working as a consumer press officer for Morrisons Supermarkets – this was very busy as you can imagine, especially during the current credit crunch crisis.

My experience is mainly consumer focused and errs more on the side of traditional PR and media relations – so I’m really looking forward to developing my social media and WOM skills here at Wolfstar. I like airing my opinions and starting a bit of a debate – so I’m sure it won’t be long until you see me with my own blog like the rest of the gang here.

I love to travel and try to get away as much as possible – I’m not fussy and am just as happy lazing by the beach as I am (attempting) to ski! Like most girls, I love shopping and fashion - but I’m fully aware that living in Bradford hardly makes me Carrie Bradshaw!

I love Leeds and try to take full advantage of everything the city has to offer – however this usually only stretches to a nice meal or one too many cocktails.

Introducing Hannah T

As the latest addition to Wolfstar I would like to introduce myself…my name is Hannah and I am currently a fourth year PR student at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Our degree offers an opportunity to do a placement year within the industry and I recently finished my internship in the UK Publicity Theatrical Department at Warner Bros. Pictures in Central London. I had an amazing year full of premieres, interviews, screenings and more for films such as I Am Legend and The Dark Knight! Although it sounds very glamorous we adopted a work hard-play hard mentality, this gave me fantastic experience and gave me a taster for life in the real word.

I am enjoying being back in Leeds after having moved home in London for the past eighteen months; as much as I love seeing old school friends and family it is nice to feel grown-up again in my own house with three fellow PR girls. However being back at university has been a big shock as we have hit the ground running with various deadlines looming and I have had to adjust quickly back into student life.

I am looking forward to helping out at Wolfstar as I am very interested in PR 2.0, social media, WOM and online brand management– areas of which, I will be researching within my dissertation analysing these techniques against more traditional PR methods.

I enjoy trips to the cinema, the occasional glass of wine and skiing (as long as it’s not down a black slope!)

The Social Media Bottleneck

‘What does this mean’ I hear you cry? Well, the social media bottleneck is a situation that we’re currently in.

Social media is a relatively new field, maybe not for the early-adopters but for most people it’s a new strand to public relations. This is especially true for clients.

The social media bottleneck represents a group of early-adopters forming social media divisions or companies and then all vying for the small pool of clients who are quick to adapt and understand the benefits of social media. We face a situation where only two or three divisions/companies actually have exciting clients – the rest of the social media sphere have to scrap around for smaller, less exciting clients.

This could have one of two effects;

The two or three original break-through social media companies/divisions retain the majority of high calibre clients because they have the case studies and experience of working on social media projects with high-level clients leaving the remaining divisions/companies to either close or only retain small clients. This would (potentially) create a dualistic environment in which the few divisions/companies were able to charge unreasonable prices and offer a relatively pedestrian service. This would hinder the development of social media, who needs to advance a medium if you’re already making a lot of money from it?

OR

As social media develops and the original clients become seen as trailblazers, then less experimental clients become more willing to take their chances with social media divisions/companies therefore leveling the field and spreading the big clients more thinly over a wide range of divisions/companies. Thus ceasing the bottleneck and increasing the need for competitive advantage in social media companies, ensuring the client always receives the highest level of service for the best price. This outcome represents the ‘age of community’ and would help develop social media beyond it’s current capabilities.

Personally I believe (and hope) that the bottleneck eases and social media begins to represent what its ideology is based upon – community. It’s the only way in which we can truly progress and help clients to integrate themselves into social media – thus encouraging less-forthcoming clients to take ‘the risk’.

Is blogging the dumbing down of news?

First I should probably introduce myself. Hi, I’m Paul crouch and I’ve just graduated from Durham in Sociology and am now trying to find a job in PR so I’m hanging round the Wolfstar office and generally getting in the way in the hope of eventually finding one. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on blogging and politics so Chris asked me to write a little something on here.

In the 1930s social thinker Theodor Adorno began writing on what he saw as the destruction of art and intelligence at the hands of mass culture, what he named the ‘culture Industry’. For Adorno the ‘culture industry’ was attacking the intellectual (French Art-house cinema for example) in favour of the empty and standardised (think Hollywood rom-coms) observing a pattern in which “The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claims to know better than others.”

That was in the 1930s and his ire was saved largely for film and music yet for many in the mainstream media Adorno could have been predicting the future that is blogging. He would see bloggers as the ill-informed majority attacking the expert and connoisseur; the massive proliferation of cheap, ill informed news sources providing proto-news and dumbing down.

In the red corner however we have Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, who popularised the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’, would have loved blogging: He claimed art had become obsessed with refusing to acknowledge the point of art being anything but itself. For our purpose I must tilt Benjamin’s complex writings to make the journalist’s process focused on sales and accolades (anyone who watched the last season of The Wire will recognise this in Scott Templeton’s pursuit of the Pulitzer at the expense of the truth). Thus Blogging ends ‘l’art pour l’art’ by removing the artist (professional journalist) in favour of the everyday person voicing opinion with, importantly, no ties to an institution and consequently the need to generate stories to sell papers and chase the Pulitzer.

Some could see Benjamin’s point, I do to an extent. We are all specialists in our own field from posters at the The Daily Kos knowing more about their local politics than any journo to the millions of ‘Mummy bloggers’ I’ve discovered in the last few days who apparently are experts in thriving with only two hours sleep a night; In Iran blogging is a voice of revolution speaking out where all other media is muzzled telling the world of real life in Iran. Put simply if a million people each with their own small corner of knowledge put their thoughts forward how can blogging not be as reliable as any newspaper?

Well, at the Daily Kos (ignoring its partisan nature, a whole different blog post) this works; every post has its very own peer review and investigation team in the form of its comments system. At most blogs though this simply isn’t available, only a handful have the massive traffic required for such a process to work. The result is a divergence; millions of unchecked little read blogs creating white noise and a few massively read highly reliable blogs, these however are highly commercial: once a blog reaches a certain popularity the blogger realises they can do this for a living and becomes a professional journalist often going as far as being becoming official bloggers for established media. By joining the commercial media the blogger cannot help but become involved with l’art pour l’art. The Daily Kos is a perfect example of this, proprietor of the site Markos Moulitsas is a full time political pundit, has a book deal and relies heavily on advertising on his site, does he really want to threaten these with the content of his site?

So here’s the rub: the most popular blogs become the same as traditional media performing l’art pour l’art. If a blog does not possess the popularity they don’t have the fact checking and investigation that readers provide. Smaller, less read blogs become an uninformed voice shouting at the expert and connoisseur for their claims to know. This leaves blogging in a precarious position: In my opinion the sheer number of small blogs with some readership creates lot’s of unreliable news versus only a handful of larger, wider read blogs working as little more than mainstream news sources robbing blogging of credibility, for the moment at least.

Introducing Becca Caddy…

Hello, I’m Becca and I’m from Scarborough, a small coastal town which everyone seems to find really fun and novel when I tell them that’s where I live. Unfortunately, It was neither of those things growing up and that’s probably why I’ve enjoyed living in a lively city like Leeds for the past three years.

After completing an English degree at the University of Leeds I have just begun an MA in Public Relations at Leeds Metropolitan University. So, when fellow students shout about the competition between “met” and “uni” I’m a bit of a misfit and tend to keep quiet. I’m already really enjoying my course and probably feel far too excited about the fact that I have finally decided which area I want to work in after toying with the idea of every profession up until now.

I found my degree very demanding so although I sat and worried about my career, my future, my aspirations and all the work experience I should be getting I didn’t actually go out and do much about it. However, now I’m back in education, very focused and extremely passionate about pursuing a career in PR. If anything my indecisiveness has made me even more determined to gain as much experience and knowledge as possible.

This is why I’m very happy to have secured some experience alongside the start of my course, at Wolfstar. As I am only learning the basics of PR at the moment I have yet to find out which area interests me the most. However, I am intrigued about the power of the internet in regards to public relations and communications so feel that my experience at Wolfstar will be extremely rewarding.

As well as enjoying my course at the moment I also love interesting accents, Christmas time and being by the sea. Oh, and I have a bit of an obsession with the cinema and day trips to Ikea.